William Edward Hanley Stanner
Stanner had a varied career that also included journalism in the 1930s, military service in World War II, and political advice on colonial policy in Africa and the South Pacific in the post-war period.
In 1967, the Prime Minister Harold Holt invited Stanner to join Herbert Coombs and Barrie Dexter to form the Commonwealth Council for Aboriginal Affairs and advise on national policy.
A number of biographical references exist, the most detailed being by Diane Barwick, Jeremy Beckett and Marie Reay which was largely completed before his death in 1981.
In 1927 Stanner obtained full-time work as a reporter for the Sydney Daily Guardian for Frank Packer, the first of a number of posts in journalism which financed his studies in Australia and England.
[1][2] In September 1933, as lecturer in anthropology at University of Sydney, in the midst of the Caledon Bay crisis, Stanner wrote a piece in The Sun in praise of the Minister for the Interior's decision not to send a punitive expedition to punish the murderer of Constable Albert McColl in the Northern Territory.
[3] In 1933 Stanner took up a temporary position on the personal staff of Bertram Stevens, the Premier of New South Wales, for whom he drafted parliamentary and public speeches and prepared reports.
[2] He earned an MA (Class 1 Honours) in Anthropology in 1934 from the University of Sydney, for which he did extensive field research in the Daly River region of Northern Australia.
Known colloquially as "Nackeroos", the men were deployed in small groups throughout the rugged north of Australia, where they observed and reported on signs of enemy activity, often patrolling on horseback.
As the unit's Commander, Major Stanner made contact with many local Aboriginal groups, and employed some to assist his troops as guides and labourers.
[12] He continued his anthropological work after the war, becoming a prominent writer, lecturer and public advocate of the study and appreciation of Aboriginal society and its place in Australia.
[14] In 1967, the Prime Minister Harold Holt invited Stanner to join Herbert Coombs and Barrie Dexter to form the Council for Aboriginal Affairs and advise on national policy.
Stanner stated that there was a "cult of disremembering" which had reduced Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to little more than a "melancholy footnote" in Australia's history.
He frequently spoke and wrote about the erasure from history of the violent colonial encounters "invasion, massacres, ethnic cleansing and resistance" between European settlers and the Indigenous population meant that there was "a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale".
[5][6][7][8] In 2005, the Australian National University commemorated the centenary of the birth of Stanner, one of its late professors of anthropology, with a conference discussing his lifetime achievements.
